Catastrophic Server Failure

On Friday, January 8, Sinister Prime, the workhorse desktop computer that was the heart of the daily work of Sinister Visions inc., unexpectedly shut down with no warning or indication that anything was wrong. It has not started since, locking up at the boot screen after 2 recovery attempts ended in failure.

On Saturday, January 9, SinisterHosting.net, the dedicated server leased from HostGator.com, did effectively the same thing. After 9 hours of tech support emails and phone calls, HostGator.com informed me that the server was dead and they "would not" attempt data recovery.

So my computer and hosting server are dead. The odds of these 2 events happening less than 24 hours from each other are staggering, but happen they have.

Sinister Visions inc. is what I do for a living, all day, every day. To say that this sucks or is a setback would be a serious understatement, for both myself and my web hosting clients.

Now, having said that, I'm not an idiot. I backed up Sinister Prime every night and, thanks to that, I haven't lost any critical files. I have a powerful laptop that I bought last summer (THANK GOD). While it will take some time, I'll get all the sites back up and running, although in many cases it'll be like starting from scratch.

I will be in direct contact with hosting clients on a site-by-site/case-by-case basis to make new hosting arrangements.

I'm posting this to answer the inevitable questions that something like this will generate, and also to say that Sinister Visions will use this setback, in the long run, to make improvements and upgrades across the board. SVi is still very much open for business.

The last few weeks have seen some heartbreaking tragedies in the lives of many of my friends and colleagues; in spite of the last 48 hours, I count myself lucky that the problems I'm experiencing are with equipment and not loved ones.

Chad Savage